December 30, 2007

Hitting a blog is an emotional expression, and some blogs attract readers by being the place it feels good to hit when you are charged up about something that is happening in the world. A mutually dependent relationship develops as the blog must satisfy your emotional needs without curing the distress that made you hit it in the first place.

30 comments:

Fear not. The "surge" will end and we will be back to business as usual as it is only a temporary fix to get Mr. Bush through the next year. Besides Kos will be served up a boutiful plenty with Iran not yet off the plate, Pakistan looming, a poppy harvest and relentless Afghani's on the prowl, not to mention Syria and Lebanon, a whole slew of places in Africa I can barely find on mapquest, and a justice department just getting reved up.

Maybe Petraeus is killing anti-war "fervor" in general. I was in Laguna Beach yesterday and the anti-war protesters were but a handful and they were all of the senior variety. There were a few car honks (like Honk if You Love Jesus) in support. And to boot, they were actually pleasant. Usually these pacifists are bloodthirsty in their disdain and hatred. They were downright friendly.

Killing Kos -- there will always be a forum for anonymous and cowardly rage and pseudo-intellectual BS. Kos will never die.

Troy said... hdhouse is right. As long as adult decisions have to be made and bravery and steadfastness......"

yes Troy I am right. however you have fallen into the trap that makes Kos go. You give "adult decisions" the attributes of bravely made and steadfastly supported. You make no mention of correct or incorrect, right or wrong.

As long as we have an administration making adult decisions based on non-supportive criteria, and they are bravely made - noting again that brave might not be the right adjective for what is being done...was Evil Knivel brave or just dumb? and then adhered to because there is no "plan b" or they are too rigid to change course, then there will be a KOS.

Simply if you don't like KOS, take away its reason for being, but don't blame KOS for your lackings.

ann is right though, it isn't appealing...its just a mix between a content aggregator and a bulletin board.

If I can be so bold as to speak for most of the straight guys who comment here, the reason why so many of us comment here is that when we look at the blog mistress's photo, we can honestly say "I'd hit that."

I'm simply amazed. I'll ever be amazed at this. The post is about Petraius possibly affecting the traffic to Kos.

And what is the first comment? How long does it take exactly? Less than an hour. This is proof, friend, you really need some professional help that making comments to blogs is not going to relieve. Believe me when I tell you, not every single thing talked about on Earth is 1 degree separation from your catalog of grievances.

You sound like a drunk. You're repeating yourself, but I repeat myself in telling you that. So here's this, piss off, you nervous old woman. I'm skipping over your comments from now on. You're unimaginative.

Yes. Petraeus affected the traffic to Kos. And I'm glad. It happened because we're winning. We're winning because 'good' compared favorably to 'evil' even to Muslims. Daily Kos is a pit anyway and I know because I've visited, looked for something interesting, anything interesting, and failed. Failed repeatedly. Unlike here, which is always lovely, except for the comments which seem to attract nervous very old women.

Guessing that Petraeus is affecting the traffic at a liberal blog is as good a guess as any, I guess.

Hell you can hear experts make a guess every evening on the nightly business report when the talking heads guess why the market went up or down that day.

I would guess KOS traffic is down (if it actually is down) because people tire of the same old subject no matter what it is.

Thus, a factor in Ann's popularity is she has a number of varying topics on which she blogs. Some interest me and some don't. KOS is repetitive non-stop ..."BDS, America Is Bad, and the world is ending unless the Dems get back in office".

KOS and blogs like his are too tiresome for me...they have no interesting ideas or conversation.

You're so full of s--t it's unbelievable. Your problem with Kos is that everyone there hates your precious Leader and his glorious War. And your problem with Greenwald is that he doesn't like that the Boy King constantly breaks the law, whereas you do.

Fear not. The "surge" will end and we will be back to business as usual as it is only a temporary fix to get Mr. Bush through the next year. Besides Kos will be served up a boutiful plenty with Iran not yet off the plate, Pakistan looming, a poppy harvest and relentless Afghani's on the prowl, not to mention Syria and Lebanon, a whole slew of places in Africa I can barely find on mapquest, and a justice department just getting reved up.

The Justice Department has just been getting reved up since Bush (43) took office. And yet, it seems that the only real Republican it has gotten was Libby. We shall see with a highly partisan Clinton AG in a bit over a year whether that will change. My prediction is that it won't.

But getting back to his original point there, that it will be back to business as usual once Bush leaves office, my first thought was that this showed a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on with the "Surge". The suggestion that it is a temporary fix seems to be significantly divorced from the reality of what Gen. Petreaus has been doing.

I think that the problem is really that calling it a "Surge" misdirects some from the fact that the increase in manpower was not the heart of the strategy, but rather was just temporary enablement of a policy of taking the country back for the Iraqis and then letting them hold it.

The "Surge" would not have worked nearly as well as it has if it had just meant merely a small increase in troop levels. Before the new strategy was put into place, those added troops would have sat in their enclaves and been picked off when they left. Rather, the surged troops were used for several purposes. One was to embed them with the Iraqi military and police, living together in Iraqi villages, towns, and cities. The second was to act as blocking forces for the terrorists being forced out of where they had fortified themselves by the combined Iraqi and U.S. clearing and holding actions. The result has been that AQI in particular has been forced into a tighter and tighter area, losing most of their safe havens over the last year.

But then, I realized that hdhouse was almost correct because a President Hillary is likely to inherit a mostly won war that could easily be blown if not pursued intelligently, and the left wing of her party is unlikely to allow her do to so.

I am less worried about Iran than I am right now about the other countries mentioned. A populous, primarily Sunni, nuclear armed, Pakistan is at the top of my worries, though I will agree that Afghanistan is also worrisome.

Part of my optimism about Iran comes from its closeness to Iraq, both geographically, and religiously. Since the ouster of Saddam Hussein, et al., the borders between the countries have opened up a lot, and one of the biggest effects that has had has been a lot of religious pressure on the clergy running Iran. For example, pictures of Grand Ayatollah Sistani have now apparently become somewhere between quite common and ubiquitous in Iran, as his views of Shi'a Islam stand in sharp contrast with those of the ruling mullahs in Iran, and thus operate to delegitimize their temporal power.

This is my problem with Greenwald, he's a verbose, awful writer. Here he is on Noonan:

"John Edwards, however, is disqualified, because four years ago, he was caught red-handed brushing his hair before a television appearance -- "poofing," in Noonan's words, which isn't really a word at all, but rather, a British epithet for a male homosexual -- "Slang: Disparaging and Offensive" -- a synonym for "faggot."

Noonan is making the same point Ann Coulter made: Edwards can't possibly be President because he's a faggot. And to make her "grown-up" case for this, she cites one of our national media's most talked-about political stories of both 2004 and again in 2007: Edwards' brushing of his hair.

What a stupid and vapid woman this is, but respected and admired by our media class because she fits right in with them -- endlessly impressed by her own sophistication, maturity and insight while drooling out platitudes one never hears except in seventh-grade cafeterias and on our political talk shows.

As always, this isn't worth noting because the adolescent stupidity on display here is unique to Noonan, but precisely because it isn't. This is how our national elections are decided: by people like her, spewing things like this."

Blah, Blah, Blah. 150 words to say (a) John Edwards isn't a faggot and (b) he doesn't like Noonan for implying same.

The "surge" will end and we will be back to business as usual as it is only a temporary fix to get Mr. Bush through the next year

Your reactions here to the war in Iraq are viewed through the prism of gaining political traction for Democrats, so you wrongly assume that the other side is doing it too. You think its all about poll numbers, because thats all anything is about for you.

Perhaps the surge is intended to destroy Al Queda in Iraq, quell the violence, and give the civil sector the time and space needed to solidify their new Democracy.

How many years after the Declaration of Independence did it take for us to do the same?

You have to wonder just how Doyle could think that anyone here has a problem with criticizing Bush. Is there anyone here who doesn't think the man has screwed up at LEAST one major policy issue during the last seven years?

I disagree with almost every significant policy of his Presidency, with the exception of the tax cuts and, broadly, the Global War on Terror. And there are many aspects of the latter that he has horribly mismanaged to our ongoing sorrow.

I never voted for him, but the Dems offer up candidates who I could count on to do worse in the only two areas I agree with Bush.

I don't think he's the Prince of Darkness, or even a high ranking demon, but I do think he's a statist. And I'm against them. And demons.

I've mentioned this here before, and the late, unlamented Lucky's response was to call me a liar for claiming I hadn't voted for him.

This is consistent from the left for me. Any support for the current President in any fashion or forum is evidence of EVIL.

God help me if I go so far as to suggest a certain degree of admiration for the guy for what he HAS managed to do in GWOT.

I have yet to be attacked--here or anywhere else--for criticizing the President.

You're so full of s--t it's unbelievable. Your problem with Kos is that everyone there hates your precious Leader and his glorious War. And your problem with Greenwald is that he doesn't like that the Boy King constantly breaks the law, whereas you do.

4:14 PM

So, what you're saying is that people like Ann who say Greenwald is a bad writer and Kos' blog has become a mess don't really mean it? It's just a cover for their real problem, which is the criticism of Bush? And, in fact, we all think Greenwald is a great writer, and that Kos' blog is crackling good read? Is that what you're saying?

Bullshit.

It's just the opposite. Greenwald is not just a bad writer, he's an embarassingly bad writer, and you know it. Kos is a good writer, but he's disappeared from his own blog, where most of the space is now taken up by campaign spinners and other varieties of hack politickers. And you know this, too. But you're such an ideological hack, you pretend to like them. Just like when I was young, trying to read the impenetrable Herbert Marcuse. My first clue that the left was not all it was cracked up to be. And Marcuse reads like Hemingway compared with Greenwald.

From what I can tell, you spend a lot more time reading and interacting with Althouse and her commenters than you spend with your alleged heroes. You don't agree with the politics, but you recognize intelligent expression of differing points of view. You find that here, and not with Greenwald or Daily Kos.

I was simply pointing out that everybody here is critical of *something* Bush did. Claiming that everybody here thinks he commits at least one major screw-up week would be idiotic, as it is obviously untrue that everyone here thinks that.